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Responding to a Diseased Economy with Friends Testimonies

OUR ECONOMY HAS STRAYED far from its divine vocation of organizing society to provide for livelihood and welfare, while protecting the earth on which it depends. As we seek a rightly ordered response, as investors and debtors and workers and citizens—as Friends—the framework of our Quaker testimonies can help.

INTEGRITY

We can’t make much progress without acknowledging the importance of integrity. Clearly it is massively lacking in our current economy and, like the fish in the sea, we cannot exist outside of it. But while a goal of purity may be beyond our reach—and may lead us to spiritual dead ends if we try— that doesn’t mean we need be immobilized or silenced.

One way to start is to take on the discipline of writing our own statements of conscience. What values do you claim in this area of money and economics? To what do you conscientiously object? On what basis? Even if there are things that you do not know or fully understand you can start by looking for a solid place on which to stand. This would be a productive exercise for Meetings to take on together.

SIMPLICITY

Simplicity is central. With an economic and monetary system that depends on continuous growth, more people need to be steadily convinced that they need more things. This requires people who are willing to be defined as consumers and vulnerable to being swayed by advertisers.

So living out our testimony on simplicity with all the intention and power we can muster—and sharing the joy of that choice with others—is part of calling the economy back to its divine vocation of providing for human welfare on a finite earth.

EQUALITY

Equality is endangered by an economy whose underlying dynamic tends to widen class differences. Added to this is the role of racism, and the great transfers of wealth from communities of color to the white world.

What might pull down the accumulation of excessive wealth? The city of Portland, Oregon, for example, has just passed an ordinance that adds a tax to corporations whose CEOs make more than 100 times the average of their workers. (In 1965, the average was 20 to 1. By 2013, this was almost 300 to 1.) Other tax policies could discourage making money from money without contributing anything to the real economy. Similarly we can put our weight behind policies to pull people up out of oppressive debt, such as payday lending, credit card fees, student debt, and underwater mortgages.

We can think even bigger, and support the idea of moving our whole money-creation system out of the for-profit banking sector, as it currently functions in the Federal Reserve.

We can support expansion of the kind of policies that helped create the post-war white middle class. (As this group’s prospects have been eroded by the resurgence of laissez-faire neoliberalism, greater insecurity brings both more commonalities with the poor and oppressed, and more fears that end up targeting those groups.) This might include efforts to raise the minimum wage; support for college education like that of the GI Bill; a revised personal income tax structure; perhaps a guaranteed income, such as that proposed by both Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon.

COMMUNITY

Since our economic system depends on getting people to act individually and on the basis of greed, community is critical to our salvation. Any efforts to retain parts of the economic system in community, or return them to community are part of the solution.

It’s easier to think of community-based ways of managing production and services than community-based ways of managing money, yet credit unions are a wonderful community-owned institution where debt and interest stay in the same closed local system. If I borrow money there, I am borrowing from my neighbors. If I have money there in savings, it is being used to support my neighbors.

We can all revisit our investment choices, moving from screening out negative investments, to actively choosing for positive investments, to investing locally, either in community investment funds or even in specific sectors or businesses.

Focusing even closer in, families or religious communities might choose to buy up student loans and credit-card debt from their members and set up loan repayment agreements with zero or minimal interest rates.

Finally, we can choose to invest in our common security by plain old sharing of wealth (our title to which tends to be pretty shaky) with groups like Right Sharing of World Resources, with their wonderful mission of relieving the burdens of both poverty and materialism.

STEWARDSHIP

With the concept of stewardship evoking separation and control, how can we shift from the idea of “mastery over” and work to understand our place within the ecosystems of which we are a part, and the role we can play as part of the whole that best enhances and maintains that whole? What can this perspective teach us about a healthy and sustainable financial eco-system?

A current practice in agriculture is to use deep and straight ditches to drain water off of fields as efficiently as possible. But it turns out that deep and straight ditches are also efficient in washing away topsoil, eroding banks, and sending agricultural poisons directly into the adjacent water supplies. It turns out that, if you’re thinking in terms of the health of the ecosystem, it’s better to have a very slow and meandering stream that takes its time, replenishes the surroundings, and does a lot of self-cleaning in the process.

Similarly, I’m pretty sure that a healthy financial ecosystem would be slow. There would not be an efficient stream whose goal was to pour stuff out at the end. Rather, as its resources meandered and percolated through the local economy, the health of the local system would be steadily replenished. It’s the difference between a model that extracts and one that generates.

PEACE

Thinking about peace, I remember someone coming back from a demonstration against the war in Iraq and talking about a sign they saw: “What is our oil doing under their sand?” How much of war is fueled by inequality and the demands of a growth economy in a world of increasing scarcity? How much is it fueled by a desire to gain greater control over wealth or productive assets or water? Removing economic injustice from that picture would certainly drain an enormous amount of conflict.

While we are entangled, we are not immobilized, and we need not be silenced. We have many roles—as debtors, investors, community members, citizens—and there are many steps we can take from where we are standing right now. With so many unknowns about the future, the energy we spend second-guessing or judging our choices, or those of others, is mostly wasted. We get to do the best we can, relying on the power of moving forward in faith, making the path by walking.

Pamela Haines is a member of Friends Economic Integrity Project and the Eco-Justice Collaborative of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.